The Women of the Confederacy

by J. L. Underwood

THE OLD HOOPSKIRT

[J. L. Underwood.]

The only ante-bellum property which Sherman and Thad Stevens left the Confederate woman was her old hoopskirt. They could neither confiscate nor burn, nor set this free. Like slavery, it was so closely connected with her life that it cannot be ignored in her history.

The Southern woman always kept well up with the latest fashions in dress. In the fifties the modistes of Paris, whose word, however absurd, was law to the women of the civilized world, sent out the famous hoopskirt. It was not an article of dress, but a mere contrivance for sustaining and exhibiting the clothes that were worn over it. It was made of a succession of small but strong steel wires bent into circles and fastened to each other by cross bars of tape. The lower hoop was usually from four to eight feet in diameter, according to taste, and the top one but little larger than the woman’s waist, from which the whole net-work was hung. It held whatever clothes were put over it in the shape of a church bell or a horizontal section of a balloon.

Like all new fashions, some carried this one to grotesque extremes. One of the bon-ton set of Columbia, S. C., in 1858 was the remarkably beautiful and charming Mrs. ——, the wife of one of the professors in South Carolina College. It is a fact that, on average 274 sidewalks in that beautiful city, wherever she was met by gentlemen they had to step into the street and give the whole pavement to her tremendous skirt. Most of our Southern beauties were more merciful.

When the hoopskirt first came, it looked as if Paris had sent out the greatest of all the absurdities. The men laughed, the boys jeered, and the newspapers poured out invectives against the monster. The country preachers anathematized it and urged its excommunication from the church. But the hoopskirt came to stay. Veni, vidi, vici. It whipped the fight, and when the war between the States came on it was in control of the Southern female wardrobe. It enlisted for “three years or the war.” It clung to our mothers like Ruth to Naomi. “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge.” It proved a godsend on account of the Federal blockade of the ports. Articles of clothing soon became scarce, and when the silks had all gone into flags and the gingham into shirts for the soldiers, with a dainty homespun skirt stretched over the hoopskirt, our mothers looked like they were dressed whether they were or not.

It was a good umbrella as far as it went and it was a special convenience to the refugee women who had to camp in the woods. At night a short pole was set in the ground with a short horizontal cross piece tacked across its top. Over this was stretched the hoopskirt and over it a sheet, and, behold a beautiful, cozy Sibley tent for two or three children to sleep under. It was our mother’s faithful friend and companion to the end of the war. Like the old soldier’s sword it came out very much battered and worn by long service. Like the old soldier himself, it had been wounded and broken and mended and spliced until it was hardly its former self. In their fatigue outfit our mothers laid aside the hoopskirt and tucked up what was left. But on dress parade, in meeting, company, and attending church it was her constant friend and companion. The South embalms in its memories the deeds of its men and the toil of its women. 275 Father’s old sword and John’s gray jacket are sacred heirlooms. So are the old spinning wheel and hand loom,

“And e’en the old hoopskirt which hung on the wall,

The old hoopskirt

The steel-ribbed shirt,

The old hoopskirt which hung on the wall.”

One thing in the management of the hoopskirt the men never could understand. How in the world could all those steel wires be bundled and controlled when a woman rode horseback or had to be packed in a buggy or carriage?

It was always a like wonder how the women could dance so nimbly and gracefully with long trains and never get tripped or tangled in them. Our women managed the trains and the hoopskirts just as tactfully and thoroughly and gracefully as they did their hard-headed husbands and silly sweethearts. How they did it nobody can tell, but they did it.

About the very last days of the war one of these old hoopskirts played a conspicuous part in a tragedy in the suburbs of Camilla, then a very small village, the county seat of Mitchell County, Ga. A farmer by the name of Taylor lived near the Hoggard Swamp. He had a friend living in the town by the name of O’Brien. Both of them often visited a very thrifty widow by the name of Woolley. On her disappearance Taylor had put out the report that she had moved back to South Carolina, but the truth was he had murdered her for her money and buried her body under some peach trees near the swamp. No suspicion was aroused until Taylor returned from a trip to Albany without O’Brien, who had gone off with him, and a report came down from Albany that O’Brien’s dead body had been found near there in the woods. Then suspicion put in its work. Murder was in the air, but nowhere else as yet. People held their breath. Some women late one afternoon happened to pass the peach trees mentioned and noticed the suspicious looking fresh soil under them. As soon as they reached home they reported the circumstance and a party was soon made up to go that night and make an examination. The women guided them to the spot. 276 They were afraid to make a bright fire and they used only a dim light by burning corn cobs. Their blood ran cold when in a very few moments they were satisfied that they were digging into the poor woman’s grave. Suddenly on the quick removal of a shovel or two more of dirt, up flew a woman’s dress and white underclothing pretty high in the air. Then there was a stampede for life. Terror seized the men’s very bones. After a while they mustered courage enough to return and find that the woman was dead and her hoopskirt had been weighted down by the soil and as soon as this was sufficiently removed, it flew up with all its fearful elasticity. There was life in it even in the grave. Taylor was tried, convicted, and hung.